What Is The Mobile Industry Up To In Barcelona?

Mobile World Congress is underway 25/02/14

You may or may not be aware that in Barcelona, the home of the impressive and unusual architectural works of Gaudi, the great and the good of the mobile world are also gathered as architects of our technological future. Well most of them anyhow, I think Apple are still not officially in attendence, but all the other usual suspects are.

Mobile World Congress has grown to be the largest international Mobile Technology focussed trade show, with the latest hand sets and tablets unveiled, as well as emerging technologies that will eventually make its way into our everyday experiences.

We know things are getting serious here as Facebook CEO Zuckerburg is talking at the show - they have just paid gazillions ($12.1 billion) for mobile messaging app WhatsApp - essentially buying around 1 billion mobile phone numbers of you and I to make yet another connection between us and our data. So, you know those annoying marketing text messages you get from takeaway pizza companies and the like? You'll be gettiing more of those according to analysts - hooray...

But there are more potentially musicall ramifications - aside from the increase in power of devices so that our apps can just do more.

But before you get excited about the new generation of wearable computing - Samsung Gear watches being the hottest news - it's worth noting that they dont run Android bbut their own Tizen OS - which means probably no music support - perhaps not even Spotify or simillar services.

Sticking with Samsung - they appear to be on a bit of a roll here the new Galaxy S5 will bring you a quad core 2.5GHz CPU and dedicated graphics processor. Thats twice as fast as my old Macbook Pro!

HTC are also planning a new Desire 816 which brings a quad core 1.6GHz with 8GB storage plus a 13MP camera and 1080p video recording - which I guess will mean more phone shot music videos? (Tenuous link alert!)

Something that will be close to everyone's heart will be accellerated network speeds - indeed, the EU have announced a new 5G research commitment of €3billion to make the new network that "will not be 4G-plus one" which I guess means that we can expect something that will equal or surpass what we can get down the wires. But don't worry, its not anywhere near happening.

So, perhaps the Masters of the Universe have had an off year, nothing massively game-changing having emerged just yet, but there is no doubt that this is where the future lies - what do you think?